I appreciate the thoughtful response. I understand the argument you're making about economic signaling, and indeed YC(b)'s milquetoast declaration of encouraging women and minority applicants would be a cheap sop to political correctness. But I think you elide an important point, which is that YC(a)'s signaling, though expensive, is also motivated by political correctness. In other words, you've tweaked two variables, when in fact only one has changed; a more accurate rendering is
YC(a) is serious about being politically correct, while YC(b) merely cares about appearing to be politically correct.
Political correctness is common to the two cases for the simple reason that YC(a) would inevitably help wealthy, well-connected female and black/Latino founders to the exclusion of, say, poor, less-privileged Asian founders. It's hard to explain this behavior in humanitarian terms, but it's easy to explain in political terms. Nobody gets in trouble these days for expressing the sentiment that we need more women, blacks, and Latinos in tech, no matter how rich and well-connected they may be.
The only other possibility I can think of is that YC(a) genuinely wants to help especially deserving founders, and such founders are so overrepresented among women and blacks/Latinos that specifically targeting those groups achieves the goal well enough for YC's purposes. In other words, the cost of reaching such founders may be so much lower when targeting specific self-identified groups that it's worth the minor cost of helping the occasional privileged member of one of those groups. Still, it's hard to avoid the observation that this policy is generally aligned with political correctness, which would appear to justify some skepticism.
(My guess is that YC's policy isn't Machiavellian in the least, but it works adaptively because of a political environment in which explicitly helping women and blacks/Latinos is strongly favored both by custom and by law.)
The ancien régime was deeply flawed, but don't forget that the winners write history. Indeed, we live inside the Revolution still, so you can trust barely anything you've ever read on the subject. If you'd like an alternate perspective, I can recommend this volume: http://www.amazon.com/French-Revolution-Revolutions-Modern-W...
Edmund Burke was a famous critic of the French Revolution.
It was as bad as its 20th century replicas, the red revolutions around the globe which were all based on the same ill notions of fairness, justice and equality.
Burke's an interesting case. Although revered by many contemporary American conservatives, he was a member of Britain's more left-wing political party, the Whigs (the counterpart to the more right-wing Tories).
Like most Whigs, Burke was a supporter of the American Revolution, but he was horrified by the excesses of its French sequel. He famously wrote his major work on the subject, Reflections on the Revolution in France, as a letter to French aristocrat Charles-Jean-François Depont, and later expanded it into a short book. In the Reflections, Burke predicted—over three years before the Reign of Terror—that the French Revolution would lead to disaster. Moreover, he specifically cited among the causes its abstract foundations disconnected from the reality of human nature.
La Terreur proved Burke right, of course, and yet the French Revolutionary principles—among them liberté, égalité, and fraternité—are for the most part as fresh as a daisy. Perhaps in the 21st century we could add diversité and inclusivité to the mix, but the basic lesson is clear: the Revolution hasn't ended. Burke's Reflections is thus more than a historical curiosity—it's also an urgent warning for the present.
I just found the obituary [1] and was considering replying with the "correct" quote, but did some more digging and discovered that you are absolutely correct [2]: the Times has, without notification, edited (some might say "airbrushed out") the original phrasing. Shameful.
It's also a lie. Try engaging the "I'm only intolerant of intolerance" crowd on, say, climate change, abortion, or the death penalty. It takes tortuous logical contortions to frame any of these issues in terms of "intolerance," and yet you'll likely be met with vitriol nonetheless.
It's even more dishonest to take all of the opinions held by individuals of some ill-defined cohort, and pretend that any inconsistencies between different individuals means that all members of the group are irrational and should be ignored.
It is dishonest but it's how political conversation has worked for a while now.
1. Create a label.
2. Demonize that label.
3. Associate people with that label.
That is the extent of political conversation. You see it pop up whenever you try to have a discussion on a topic and people start lashing out at things you haven't even thought about much less discussed. They're not having a conversation with you, they've having a conversation with a caricature.
The group I mentioned is precisely defined, and 100% opt-in—it's the set of all people who say "I'm only intolerant of intolerance."
all members of the group are irrational and should be ignored
Are you accusing me of thinking that? Because I didn't say that, and I don't think that. Reread my comment: saying "you'll likely be met with vitriol" implies that the converse—that you won't be met with vitriol—is also possible.
This is well-done, but I wish such treatments spent more effort establishing that climate change projections are (a) reliable and (b) catastrophic. Those two points are the essence of the case, and yet they're usually just assumed. (Note that whether climate-change is anthropogenic or not is utterly beside the point. That so much attention is paid to this peripheral issue is a major red flag.)
It's not about politeness; it's about political power. In particular, the definition of "polite" is entirely asymmetric, with "marginalized groups" (basically, everyone but straight white males) given carte blanche to police others' speech and actions. In the case of Halloween costumes, you can see the asymmetry easily: a Native American man can dress as the Lone Ranger, but a white man can't dress as Tonto. (More precisely, a white man complaining that it's racist for a Native American to dress as the Lone Ranger would probably be ignored, and might even be called a racist himself.)
This has a rationalization, of course; it's OK because straight white males perpetuate "structural racism," imposing a "heteropatriarchy" on gays, women, and people of color. The practical result involves stripping power from straight white males and giving it to everyone else.
From an adaptive point of view, ripping off chunks of power and giving them to your supporters is a winning political formula. But pleasant nostrums about sticking up for the downtrodden are little more than a thin veneer over a good old-fashioned tribal throwdown.
I believe that many people genuinely feel unsafe when in the presence of someone whose political beliefs offend them. The problem arises when that person, or those beliefs, do not in fact represent a threat. In such a case, feeling unsafe is delusional. Indulging this delusion just invites more delusion, which predictably spirals out of control.
The solution is to explain that feeling unsafe is unjustified when there is no credible threat. This strategy is not presently a reliable route to political power, which is why it's not being pursued. On the contrary, every concession to the delusion—e.g., the creation of "safe spaces" to protect people from largely imaginary threats—is testament to the present power of complaint. As long as there are special "protected" classes under the law (in the name, of course, of equality), we can expect more of the same.
Scott Alexander covers some of the most salient points here:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
See Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate for a book-length treatment.
(all male, all white) scientists
This is both ad hominem and wrong (the fourth scientist featured, Dr. Debra W. Soh, is an East Asian woman).